Tales of Phantasia

DeJap

v1.2 February 12th, 2001

Description

What's New

Many, many bug fixes, both for the script and graphical problems. Several items and names of people and places have been renamed since they were previously translated incorrectly. The garbage item bug caused by sorting has been fixed. However, if you have a garbage item in your inventory already, this new patch wont get rid of it, you'll just have to sell it. Also, it has been confirmed that the display of corrupt graphics at certain points in the game, is due to a corrupt rom and not the translation patch. As with the last patch, don't expect all save states to work with the new version, instead, save your game to a save game slot and reload it using the new patch. Enjoy.

Release Information

Is this really the final? Yes! Every bit of Japanese we have come across in the game has been dealt with, with the sole exception of the Japanese voices. There are no plans to do any sort of dubbing. As far as the translation goes, this is the final patch. As far as special features are concerned, we're not quite done with it yet. This patch can be considered a final, and anything new after this would be considered a bonus release. This patch is also a beta. We expect many bugs to be reported after this release, which we will fix before releasing a bonus patch. So, let us know of any problems. Not being able to patch the rom is not a bug!

Much has been changed since the last release. We recommend you start over from the beginning, rather than continuing where the game dies using the beta patch. You'll enjoy it a lot more if you do.

History

Interest for this project sparked after CyBeRGoth made some initial findings. Soon afterwards, the script was dumped by Dark Force in 1997. The main text was translated during Chess Piece Face and Makokichi's spring break in 1999. The remaining text was translated in the following few weeks, then revisions began. The final script revisions, along with the new text compression scheme, were written in late 2000.

Words from the Authors

Chess Piece Face
I remember seeing a Tales of Phantasia cart a long time ago. I figured nothing could ever possibly compete with the fun I had playing Final Fantasy IV and VI. Man, I was wrong. I love this game. I was so excited when it began to work on ZSNES, and like many others, drooled over the thought of it being translated. Through a bizzare set of events (meeting makokichi at school and becoming friends, and getting set up to chat with Dark Force over the possibility of Tales' translation) is a time in my life I'll never forget. makokichi and I worked our butts off over that spring break to translate the entire main text of the game together. I hope that everyone enjoys the game, and enjoys the translation - with a little luck, it won't be my last. As hard as I've worked on this game, it's totally inappropriate for me to take too much credit. All I did was love the game, respect the project, and pitch in when and where I could. makokichi definitely deserves the most credit in the translation, and Dark Force deserves more credit than anyone for the whole project. It's his baby, and he worked his ass off for it even when he was so frustrated with the project, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the guy. He's damn nigh impossible to please sometimes, but that's only because he expects the nothing but the best from himself and his team.
Lastly, a huge thank you is deserved for everyone else who helped out, supported, e-mailed or whatever to the team. It is appreciated, even if sometimes you don't get an e-mail back. The game being translated is thanks enough for me, but the "good job"s and the "you guys rule"s are icing on the cake.

Dark Force
A long time ago, I saw a reference to Tales of Phantasia in some gaming magazine. The game was bigger than most Neo Geo carts of the time and it had real voices. It seemed amazing for an SNES game and as I expected it would never come out over here. I followed SNES emulation from the very start, once it got to the point where many commercial games were emulated, I went hunting for ToP. Needless to say it didn't work at the time. From my days in the console scene, I had come across a ToP patch by PopC0rn, which removed the intro (which used extended mapping which wasn't emulated) from the game allowing it to run on a 32mb copier. This meant the patched rom should also work on an emulator. Though only the sound menu worked with the patched rom, it was still amazing to see it being emulated.
I then developed an interest for seeing it getting fully emulated. I knew it would work on a 64mb GameDoctor, so I sought out people who had those copiers and got them to run various tests in an attempt to figure out what the GameDoctor was doing that emulators weren't. UnaFarmer turned out to be the most helpful. With help from F.H, we figured out the memory mapping scheme and passed it on to zsKnight. By then, zsKnight had already figured out half the mapping on his own. We gave him the missing piece and then ToP instantly became emulated. The info was then shared with other emulators. The main problem was that the only ToP roms around came from a GameDoctor, and the way a GD interleaves a 48mb rom is completely fucked up. Had we started with a rom from a Super Wildcard (non-interleaved), ToP probably would have been emulated a lot sooner. Around the same time, right before ToP was emulated, FanWen showed up and offered his knowledge on ToP's mapping and a rom dumped from a Super Wildcard. An interleaved rom is a pain in the ass to hack, so I had only been working with the rom FanWen sent me. Yet all the roms on the net were GD dumps, so I decided to release the uninterleaved rom. That is why we have the problem of interleaved and non-interleaved ToP roms and patches.
Now that ToP was emulated, I thought why not translate it as well. I didn't start seriously looking at it until after CyBeRGoth started his hack on it. My original intention then was just to help him out. I was lucky to team up with Chess and Mako. They did the fastest translations I'd ever seen. An RPG script in just 1 week! Chess was a really great person to work with. We shared the same consideration towards translating and agreed on many things. We disagreed on some, but who doesn't? The quality of the storyline can be credited to Chess. He revised the script 3 times over to make sure it delivered the best overall story. I doubt Namco could have done as good a job. I felt a perfect hack was needed to suit a great script. The hacking wasn't easy, it was a learning experience for me in some ways. Anyone who thinks this game isn't hard to hack, hasn't dug deep enough. Sure, individual bits may seem simple, but coordinating all the hacks to work together, combined with variable width font, a new compression scheme, reorganized memory management and a multilingual system, is no simple task.
The thing keeping the project alive was enjoyment of the work. Once the work wasn't fun anymore, we released the old beta patch so that people would send us encouragement in order to help us get back on track.
The multilingual translations, for example, are a result of the fan support. Had there not been such strong support from people all over the world, we wouldn't be involved in any language other than English. So thanks to everyone who supported us over the years.

Credits

Programming
Dark Force

English Translation
Makokichi
Chess Piece Face

Graphics Editing
Chess Piece Face
Dark Force

Special Thanks
CyBeRGoth - for all his findings and help
F.H - for his snes9x mod used to debug ToP
zsKnight - for lots of great help
LordTech - for the opening quote text image and his snes9x mods
Neill Corlett - for very useful information on many different things
Forte - for his excellent beta testing
Dantares - also for his excellent beta testing
Impulse69 - for his beta testing
Gogeta75 - for his thorough bug reports and testing
Disnesquick - for swapping info with us from his ToP project
FanWen - for his ToP rom and support
And everyone else who has supported us

Much of what I know about this ROM is already detailed in the YouTube descriptor: ikari sent me this ROM via Twitter. 8M Pack provided by @ZueriHB. Based on the month and format I would presume this is...